Python: the WHY, what and how

@joemeilinger

Why Python?

• GIS support (ESRI's ArcPy, QGIS, etc)
• General-purpose
• Great glue language
• Easy to learn
• Tons of great libraries
• Strong community
• Open Source
• Roots in education (STEM'y)

what?

• Dynamically-typed
• Interpreted (CPython)
• Reference counted (CPython) vs garbage collected
• Some history
•  

How

• IDE support not so great (Eclipse plugin, PyCharm and that's about it)
• BUT, you don't need an IDE
• Virtualenv (virtual python environments, allows for side-by-side standalone interpreters/sets of libraries)
• Nose (unit test runner)
• IPython notebooks (best REPL yet)
• Quite a few interpreters, CPython, PyPy, JPython (JVM), Iron Python (.NET)
• Comes with ALL distributions of Linux